Group to make the Hillman. This fit the Japanese stereotype: an industrious but essentially uncreative people. It was part of Western industrial lore that the Japanese were simple innovators copying everything they could-even the iron replacement patches on the boilers of early British battleships. This smug dismissal of Japanese talent left America (and Europe) vulnerable (Way, 1988, pp. 57-58).
By 1930 Soichiro Honda had teamed up with another young industrialist, Takero Fujisawa, and created the prototype of the "Dream Type D" motorcycle. Within 15 years, the machine would dominate the world market and destroy the British motorcycle industry which had been the imperious leader since the mid 1920s.
The antithesis of the stereotyped Japanese automation, Honda propelled his little company to the top by creating the most technically advanced motorcycles in the world. In the 1930s he had attended the High School of Technology in Hamamatsu, a city on the south coast of Honshu, in the same region which Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, and Torakas
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